How to use foreign trade website to effectively expand international markets?

Expanding international markets is vital for foreign trade enterprises and export manufacturers to survive and grow. No matter what kinds of export promotion or marketing strategies you used, a key factor to success is your foreign trade website. Why ?

It is true for the following reasons:

1) High trade platform competition
There is a mis-concept in many foreign trade enterprises that a web presence with the product images will attract buyers and close transaction. Hence, many export companies set up their websites on the B2B export portal without actively and seriously building their own foreign trade export marketing website. Since these sites in the B2B export portal are displayed in the similar form, it is unable to highlight the characteristics of enterprises and their products. Hence, it is very difficult for the business to attract international buyers’ attention among the fierce competition of many similar sites on the B2B export portal platform. Even though the international buyers can find your products, it only starts with a low price competition among your competitors at the export portal. Your export business falls in the low-level OEM manufacturer bottleneck.

2) More flexible in export marketing strategies
Many export manufacturers think that the B2B trade portal is a cost-effective way to compete in internet and expand oversea markets. It is indeed undeniable it can bring some buyers to enquiry via the platform, but this undoubtedly restrict the business development. Why? It is because not all oversea buyers are using such a portal to search for product suppliers. Most prefer to use Google to search on the Internet. Therefore, a search engine friendly (SEO friendly) foreign trade export marketing website is very important. Moreover, it is not very expensive setting up such an exporting marketing website to allow you to benefit from a wide variety of export marketing strategies such as PPC (Pay-per-click Ad, Adwords, etc.), search engine optimization (SEO), permission-based email marketing, social media and inbound marketing, B2B foreign trade platform, exhibition marketing, and so on ……

3) Enhancing the corporate image and its credibility

No matter what marketing strategies (e.g. email marketing, B2B foreign trade platform, or exhibition marketing) used, foreign buyers at first evaluate you thru your foreign trade website. They believe your corporate website will reflect your management personnel’s capabilites. If your website poorly organized with incorrect translation and/or grammatical mistakes , difficult to use, hard to search for required information, or judgment from your website that you do not deserve cooperation, your customers will leave and give up communicating with you. It means all your export marketing efforts void. Hence, professionalism of foreign trade export marketing website largely restricts the effectiveness of your export promotion. Worse still, is that some export companies use the B2B export trade platform and do not have their own websites. It is similar to a company using free webmail and gives very informal feel. What will your protential customers think if you could not afford even a corporate website? What is your size? Will you have the production capacity to timely complete your orders? When will this business suddenly disappear? How difficult can such export business build clients’ confident?

As previously explained, the export marketing website is so important. What should we pay attention to build this website?

They can be listed as below:

Concern web design in more details, focusing on the customer usability;

Professional web design and corporate email services to establish a professional image;

Site navigation should be clear, user-friendly, easy to search required information by customers;

Build a search engine friendly export marketing website;

Professional content and business profiles, highlighting the company’s positioning with customer success stories to win customer trust;

The English version of the site should be carefully proof-read and avoid translation and spelling errors；

Privacy policy should be set to declare the usage of the email subscriptions;

Site should be easily maintained by users to frequently update the product information;

Monitor the website traffic and visitors’ activites and optimize the site as necessary.